From my diary

A.J. Festugière, Sainte Thècle, saints Côme et Damien, saints Cyr et Jean (extraits), saint Georges. Traduits et annotés, Paris: Picard, 1971, arrived by ILL a week ago. Something made me guess that it might contain French translations of some of the miracle stories printed by Aufhauser in S. Georgii Miracula, Teubner, 1913; and so it does! In fact it looks as if M. Festugière translated the whole set, or very nearly so.

The existence of a translation is a blessing, and I’ll will add it to my St George bibliography when I get the time to compile the St George blog post. Since the individual texts are nothing – merely one incarnation of the folk-story, rather than a literary text – this is probably quite enough for anybody but specialists.

I saw today on Twitter a BMCR review of a volume of translations from the Menologion of Simeon Metaphrastes, describing them as “Christian novels”, which they are. The review claimed that hagiographical texts are the most frequently translated Byzantine texts, which seems like an interesting claim.

I’ve not been able to blog much for some time. For the last year I have been on contract away from home. Fortunately there is only 5 days remaining, and then I am free. I plan to holiday in July and August. If God wills then I will find a new contract in September which is closer to home. But whatever He wills is good.

I have collected quite a list of ideas for blog posts in the mean time and no doubt these will appear once I have recovered from the contract. The main post that I want to write is an overview of St George and his literature. I will return to translating Eutychius too.

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2 thoughts on “From my diary”

Great! Festugière is one of the people who sound worth learning French to read, since, alas, so little of his work seems translated (on the assumption scholars are plyglots where Modern Languages are concerned?).

I would love to know more about ‘genre perception’ in Christian (late) antiquity – e.g., who, then, (would have) clearly distinguished “Christian novels”, and what of the Shepherd of Hermas (accepted as canonical in some Churches as far as I know)?

Hi Roger,
The book you mention is part of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. The title actually uses the term ‘Christian Novels’. Lots of the Metaphrastic lives were translated in Slavonic, Georgian, Arabic, Romanian, Modern Greek, Russian, etc so I suspect the claim about being the most translated texts refers to this.